John Lydon will 'never forgive' his estranged Sex Pistols bandmates for taking him to court while he cared for his late wife. The singer, known as Johnny Rotten in the punk band, lost a 2021 lawsuit over the Sex Pistols’ music rights for their TV miniseries, Pistol that aired on Disney+. He was excluded from the production and felt it dishonoured the band's legacy.
Now Lydon has said: “I’ll never forgive them for the way that they piled that court case on me while my wife was dying of Alzheimer’s. It was a most unfortunate act on their part, and then using Disney to strip-mine me.”
Legal battle and financial strain
Guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook won the case and were allowed to proceed with the project, leaving Lydon out of pocket. He explained: “If I didn’t raise, say, $10 million after the first week, the case couldn’t go on. That’s money I could have spent taking care of my lovely Nora (wife). They knew she was ill.”
Nora Forster died in 2023, but the singer says none of the band got in touch with him. He told Rolling Stone: “The dirt that they unloaded on me in a time where I was in real serious grief … No, I cannot forget about that.”
No reunion hopes
The Sex Pistols have since toured with a new singer Frank Carter, but Lydon is not impressed and has ruled out a reunion. 'It’s in the minus infinities,' he said of hopes they may get back together. 'I don’t have spite in me. No, if they’d gone about this another way and were open and friendly with me, who knows what gifts that may have brought, but they decided skullduggery was the order of the day.'
